Title
Factors Influencing International Political Rights: A Multiple Regression Analysis
Document Type
Presentation
Publication Date
April 2010
Faculty Sponsor
Dr. Ross Burkhart
Abstract
For my undergraduate research, I evaluated what factors influenced a nation’s political rights score as determined by the international organization, Freedom House. I conducted this study by developing a multiple regression analysis through Pollock’s Political Analysis SPSS output. The data set contained the political rights scores of 114 different nations. I focused on five major indicators in my analysis of political rights including: the ethno-linguistic heterogeneity of a country, the feelings of each country's population towards religion, the economic development of a nation, the percentage of the a country's population that is rural, and whether the country awarded women's suffrage before or after 1920. The model has an R Square of .779, which means that the independent variables explain 78 percent of the variation in the political rights scores of nations around the world. Other tests confirmed that each of the five independent variables were effective in determining the variation within the dependent variable. Each of my original hypotheses were confirmed by analysis. The model revealed that all other things being equal, as a particular country’s ethno-linguistic hetereogeneity increased, the political rights score decreased; as the percentage of country’s population that viewed religion as “very important” increased, the political rights score decreased; as the economic development of a country increased, the political rights score increased, as the percentage of a country’s population that was rural increased, the political rights score decreased and if a nation awarded women’s suffrage before 1920 it would have a higher political rights score than if suffrage had been awarded after 1920. This project is complete.